As digital media technology improves and the price of storage decreases, users increasingly host collections of digital media on their personal computers. But users often desire for their digital media collections to be portable. More and more, users seek to transfer all or some of their collections to portable client devices. Digital media includes, for example, music, images, videos, and the like.
Users transfer media content from personal computers to a variety of other devices including other personal computers and portable consumer electronic media devices. Examples of portable devices include Personal Media Players (e.g., MP3 players), Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), cell phones, notebook or laptop computers, and other portable client devices. Transferring at least part of a digital media collection to a portable device allows a user to enjoy media away from his or her main personal computer.
With the advent of relatively high capacity storage on portable client devices, users can store large numbers of media files on their devices. But filling such a device with a meaningful subset of a user's digital media collection can be a laborious task. This is especially true when the user's digital media collection is larger than the storage on the device (e.g., 100 GB digital media collection on the main computer and 5 GB storage on the client device).
Unfortunately, conventional digital media systems require users to manually manage this problem. If the collection of digital media on a user's source device (e.g., main personal computer) exceeds the storage capacity of the target device (e.g., portable client device), the user must manually select which items to include (and/or exclude) in a transfer from the source to the target. Furthermore, under conventional approaches, a user must remove items from an otherwise full memory of the target device when the user wishes to replace it with a new item from the collection on the source device.
The problem is compounded by the absence of an extensible solution that can be partnered with any number of devices and that can deal with potential device-side changes available with an open device model.
In light of the foregoing, improvements in processing digital media content are desired to permit automatically synchronizing content based on a set of rules (comprised of playlists, for example) and other features.